Propaganda and the Catalonia Referendum

The laziness of journalists is legendary. Especially these days, when the line
between journalist and propagandist has been blurred, the many ways in which
these scribblers take shortcuts and otherwise seek to make their jobs less strenuous
have been greatly increased. While outright plagiarism used to be the favored
method, with the advance of technology this has become much easier to detect,
and so the self-indulgent scribe has moved on to other, less obvious shortcuts.
The substitution of opinion for the reporting of facts is one way to fill up
a page, and, in tandem with this, the adoption of a formula is now a mainstay
of “mainstream” journalism. This is unashamedly borrowed from those writers
of pure fiction who labor in the fields of various sub-literate genres – say,
pornography – and must churn out large quantities of product in order to pay
the rent. Saddled with a limited imagination, and pressed for time, these third-and
–fourth-rate wordsmiths have only to latch on to the time-honored scripts which
have been created by their more inventive predecessors: with the plot-lines
mapped out in advance, all they have to do is fill in the blanks (background,
character names) and – voila! – the job is done.

In our degenerated era, the rules for fiction and nonfiction are the same:
one simply has to follow the formula. In its “journalistic” incarnation, the
formulaic model has flourished in the era of the new cold war: one simply has
to attribute any and all political phenomena that challenge the status quo to
the supposedly all-pervasive and semi-omnipotent influence of the Russians.

From Brexit to the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election,
everything the Establishment disapproves of is credited to – or, rather, blamed
on – the Kremlin, and specifically the Machiavellian figure of Vladimir Putin,
whose demonic genius bestrides the world. Add to this the advance of technology,
and the “Putin did it” formula is ready to be deployed by the Powers That Be
and their journalistic camarilla.

A classic example of the genre is a
recent piece by one David Alandete, the managing editor of Spain’s “liberal”
nationalist daily, El Pais, who writes:

“After undercover campaigns in favor of Brexit and the leader of the French right-wing party National
Front, Marine Le Pen, as well as the far-right in Germany, the Kremlin is using the Catalan crisis as a way to deepen divisions within Europe and
consolidate its international influence. It appears in the form of websites
that publish hoax stories, the activity of activists such as WikiLeaks founder
Julian Assange and a legion of bots – millions of automated social media accounts
that can turn lies into trending topics.”

Here is the “Putin-did-it” formula in its chemically pure form. Since there
is no real substance in this kind of “reportage,” it’s all about style: the
promiscuous use of words and phrases such as “hoax stories” (what stories?)
and “lies” (which ones?). Making arbitrary assertions, uttered as if they’re
uncontroversial facts, is the essence of this methodology. There is not the
slightest effort to prove the premise behind the author’s contention that independence
for Catalonia would “weaken the United States and the European Union.” How?
What has this got to do with the United States? We are never told. The Catalans
have indicated
that they would enter the EU (indeed, their economic security would depend on
it) – and so why would their independent status “weaken” the Union? Alandete
doesn’t bother to ask, let alone answer, these questions.

Instead, the clichés gather like moths around a flame, whirling and fluttering
in a veritable cloud of obfuscation. We are told that “it is no coincidence”
that the Russian government web site, RT – which has a minuscule readership
both in Spain and the US – “has published 42 articles on the crisis in Catalonia
with inaccurate headlines such as ‘The
European Union will respect the independence of Catalonia but it will have
to pass through an adhesion process.’”

While I am not a regular reader of RT, and would not vouch for its reporting
in every instance, in this case they are merely echoing mainstream Western media
outlets. EU President Jean Claude Juncker has stated
that the EU would “respect”
the outcome of a “yes” vote in the Catalan referendum, but that the newly independent
region would have to apply for EU membership just like any other aspiring member.
While Juncker subsequently backtracked
a bit by saying the referendum would have to be approved by the Spanish
legislature, this hardly validates Alandete’s contention that the Catalan independence
movement represents a threat to the EU’s cohesion: indeed, quite the opposite
is the case. But then again, accuracy is not Alandete’s concern.

Taking his cues from his American handlers, Alandete
has quite the hard-on for Julian Assange, who is described as an agent of the
Kremlin as well as “the principal international agitator in the Catalan crisis,”
whose agitation has caused pro-Catalan sentiment to “go viral.” We are treated
to a tedious account of Assange’s many tweets promoting the Catalan cause,
alongside the contention that a good many of Assange’s followers aren’t real
people at all but merely Russian-controlled “bots”:

“Messages on social media usually go viral over the course of several days
because the act of sharing a message depends on the decision of followers in
several countries. But in the case of the tweet from Assange, as with many of
his messages on the social media platform, it received 2,000 retweets in an
hour and obtained its maximum reach – 12,000 retweets, in less than a day. The
fact that the tweet went viral so quickly is evidence of the intervention of
bots, or false social media profiles, programmed simply to automatically echo
certain messages.”

So where’s the evidence of his bot-heavy following? Well, it looks like some
web site called “Twitter Audit” that purports to detect bots claims that more
than half of Assange’s followers are “fake” – i.e. bots, presumably personally
controlled by Putin. Yet the same site claimed half of Donald Trump’s followers
are bots, an assertion debunked by actual Internet experts. As Philip Bump
pointed
out in the Washington Post: “That evaluation is both less rigorous
than the one used by the researchers in the USC study – and a lot more variable.
As of [this] writing, Trump’s Twitter following is estimated to be only 30 percent
fake. That’s a lower percentage than, say, @barackobama – or The Washington
Post.”

In short, Alandete’s “evidence” that Assange’s pro-Catalonia tweets are being
popularized by Russian-controlled “bots” is pure b.s. The founder and voice
of WikiLeaks is surely well-known enough to not require such assistance: but
in the conspiracist world of Señor Alandete, acknowledging such obvious facts
is impermissible. Everything is a Russian plot.

Edward Snowden, another pro-Catalonia tweeter, is another target of Alandete’s
obsession with Russian conspiracies. We are told that Snowden “collaborates
on a regular basis with Russia’s secret services,” a factoid that can doubtless
be verified by Louise Mensch. And I am also part of this Russian cabal:

“One of Assange’s tweets to have the greatest impact in the last seven days
(2,200 retweets and 2,000 likes) included a screenshot and a link to article
by a firm ally of the Russian view in the United States – Justin Raimondo, director
of the website AntiWar, and an anti-globalization activist who has supported
Trump. The article – headlined ‘In Catalonia: A Spanish Tiananmen Square?’ –
compared the protests in Barcelona with the Chinese repression in 1989, which
lead to the death of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.”

Yes, like myself, those Russians are notorious libertarians – why, I wouldn’t
be surprised if, on the morrow, they erected a statue of Murray Rothbard next
to Lenin’s tomb! As for being an “anti-globalization activist,” I’m pretty sure
that requires dreadlocks, and more than a few tattoos, neither of which comports
with my aesthetic model. As for my attitude toward Trump, it can best be described
as anti-anti-Trump,
but subtlety is apparently beyond Alandete’s purview – nuance and propaganda
go together like pickles and ice cream – and so we’ll let that one go.

In any case, this litany of inaccuracies is followed by a quote from my piece,
in which I point out the likelihood of the Spanish state using violence to suppress
the Catalans – a prediction which, it
seems, is already
coming to pass even
as I write. And while there is no telling what the scale of the violence
will be, certainly the smallest incident has the potential to spiral into an
outright insurrection. Fourteen Catalan officials have been arrested by the
Spanish police, so far, for organizing the referendum: thousands of Spanish
soldiers have poured into Catalonia, and they aren’t going there to direct traffic.
Ballots have been seized: Internet sites have been closed down. The offices
of newspapers and printers involved in the referendum have been raided.

And so the question is raised; what will happen on October 1, the date of the
referendum? Is it really out of the question that we’ll
see a Catalan Tiananmen Square? Of course it isn’t: indeed, it’s quite likely.
Which is why Alandete doesn’t contest what I’ve written: he merely quotes me.
And if my prediction comes true, you can bet Alandete will be among the first
to justify the murderous actions of the neo-Francoist Spanish state.

Ah, but now we stumble on the dirty little secret
of propagandist hacks, whose laziness is a qualification rather than a detriment
to their jobs. Alandete writes:

“The definitive proof that those who mobilize the army of pro-Russian bots
have chosen to focus on the Catalan independence movement can be seen in the
fact that Catalonia has begun to appear in the list of regular topics on social
media alongside Syria, Russia, Ukraine, Trump, Hillary Clinton and the so-called
Islamic State (ISIS).

“This is reflected by the results of the
Hamilton 68 tool developed by the Alliance for Securing Democracy,
a project of the German Marshall Fund created in the wake of Russian meddling
in the US elections. This tool permanently monitors 600 pro-Kremlin accounts,
both real and false. In 48 hours from Wednesday to Friday last week, one of
the most-used hashtags employed by these profiles was #Catalonia, behind others
including #HerpesHillary and #Trump.

“According to this tool, one of the media outlets most widely shared by
these pro-Russian profiles was Antiwar, home to the opinion article comparing
Barcelona and Tiananmen.”

“The definitive proof”! Oh, there it is, as revealed
by the Alliance for Securing Democracy – an
alliance of warmongering neoconservatives, embittered Hillaryites, and a
gaggle of European governments with separatist movements on their own soil to
contend with.

To begin with, the “Hamilton68
tool” is an elaborate joke: they purport to measure “Russian influence”
on the Internet, specifically on social media like Twitter, but refuse to reveal
the 600 Twitter accounts they monitor. Not that they have anything to hide,
mind you. May we presume that Assange, Snowden, and myself are included among
the Seditious 600? Here again we see the utility of the propagandist style,
which substitutes assertions for solid facts. One has only to look at the Hamilton
“dashboard” to note that these alleged Russian agents are tweeting what the
rest of the Twitterverse is tweeting about: the stories that dominate whatever
news cycle we’re in.

The pretense of “science” is an essential part of the propaganda: The use of
words like “tool,” and the conceit of precision implied by the measurement of
arbitrary markers like hashtags, which are often merely topical, is supposed
to give the arbitrary pronouncements of hacks like Alandete the gloss of objectivity.
Yet to anyone with even a modicum of a critical faculty, this “dashboard” is
laughable: right now it’s telling me that the Russians are pushing Trump’s criticism
of the NFL knee-benders – because, after all, Putin wants to encourage American
patriotism even as he plots to destroy the country.

Why bother with reporting reality when you can go to the “Hamilton68” “dashboard”
and get prefabricated “facts” to fit your prejudices? It’s easy, convenient,
and practically effortless. Who needs reality when you can invent your own?
And that, my dear readers, is the definition of propaganda.

President Trump’s joint press conference with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy,
in which he called the cause of Catalan independence “foolish,” is being hailed
by the Castilian supremacists as an “unambiguous” declaration of support for
a unitary Spain, in the
words of Radio Free Europe. However, close observers of Trumpisms will note
that, while hailing Spain as a “great country,” and opining that “I’m just for
a united Spain, I really think the people of Catalonia would stay with Spain,
I think it would be foolish not to,” he
did not come out against the holding of referendum. Indeed, he said the
independence movement would lose if such were held:

“‘I think the people of Catalonia have been talking about this for a long
time.’ Trump said. ‘I’m just for a united Spain,’ he said, adding that if accurate
polling were done in the region ‘you’d find out people of Catalonia love their
country, they love Spain.’”

Here, I think, Trump is talking to Rajoy, who is standing next to him, as much
as to the rest of us. He’s telling him to relax, and maybe don’t call in the
tanks on October 1. Can’t you just hear him? “Let them vote – you’re a sure
winner! By Christmas you’ll be so sick of winning that you’ll say: ‘Trump, please
make it stop!’”

Yeah, just
like Luther Strange. So far as I know, Trump has yet to tweet about Catalonia,
which means it’s not official, so I’m not sure how seriously to take his remarks.
Be that as it may, of one thing we can be sure: if the Catalans do break free,
Trump will be hailing Catalonia as “great” and embracing Catalan President Carles
Puigdemont just like he’s embracing
Roy Moore.

It’s slightly hilarious that Trump, supposedly the biggest Kremlin Tool of
them all, is coming out on the other side of the barricades from his Russian
puppetmasters. I’m not sure how the “Hamilton dashboard” is going to integrate
this counterintuitive development into their “scientific” calculations, but
I’m sure the combined genius
of Bill Kristol, the Three Mikes (McFaul, Morell, and Rogers), and Jake Sullivan
will come up with something.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets
are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist
of me thinking out loud.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo passed away on June 27, 2019. He was the co-founder and editorial director of Antiwar.com, and was a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He was a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and wrote a monthly column for Chronicles. He was the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo